"You've Got Porn!"), the rest being get-rich-quick schemes and second-mortgage offers and then every once in a while an e-mail from someone I actually know, usually not a personal message but a forwarded joke or humorous news item or, alas, some doctored nude picture of a celebrity.
When I drive in through the gate it's already past nine and so the yard has pretty much cleared out of trucks and equipment trailers. Jack's SUV isn't here, either, which dumb thing of dumb things gives me a welling of idiot pride, all because I imagine he's out directing his men, which he probably isn't, as he's probably doing estimates and yakking with suppliers or meeting with his bankers to discuss the possible IPO, which seems less likely every day. I must say the place looks pretty decent, despite the fact that the whole property is paved and fenced and should be nothing special to look at, if not a typical industrial zone eyesore. The three acres Pop and his brothers paid diddly-squat for after the war is probably worth at least a million now as long as there's not some huge environmental problem with it because of all the motor oils and fuels we keep around here, not to mention the fertilizers and lawn chemicals.
Down the road is a cluster of smallish houses from the 1950s where a girl I dated one summer named Rose lived with her mother and aunt and sad drunk of a stepfather who she said touched her once but never again because she practically bit the tip of his ear off and he got spooked and cried like a baby, and I mention her mostly because since then I've somehow always associated Battle Brothers with her, if in the smallest way; in fact there's not been a time I've come here that my thoughts haven't ranged to the Cahills' cramped, dusty house that always smelled of frying bacon and stale beer, and to Rose, who would tug down my undershorts back in the far bay of our garage with a wry sneaky smile and handle me so roughly with her short fingers I sometimes had to ask her to stop. We got along fine enough, but the funny thing was that Rose saw me as a rich kid and I suppose compared to her, with her big toe poking through her thirdhand Mary Janes, I definitely was; after necking we'd walk back to her house and sit on the front stoop, and more than once she said I had it made in the shade for the rest of my life.
I knew even then that she was probably right, which made me feel equal parts pride and resentment for Pop and the family and a kind of unfair dominion over her that I've admittedly also felt with Daisy and Rita (and Kelly), who all came from pretty hardscrabble backgrounds and though generally not into money weren't exactly naive about it either. And maybe they all partly fell for me because of the very inevitability of my future, which is the happy, lucky curse of much of my generation and the next but I'm not sure will be for Jack or his kids, despite these flush times. Sometimes I think Jack and Eunice subcon-sciously know this, too, and maybe that's why they tend to go overboard with the spending, as if they're not just suburban American well-to-do but jet-set wealthy, to get theirs while they still can.
As for the Battle Brothers building, Jack has changed quite a few things since I early-retired, including the old hand-painted script signage of "Battle Brothers," which he switched out for hefty three-foot-high stainless steel letters that were drilled into the building. Jack likes to refer to the place as "the firm,"
but to me it'll always be just a shop. A few months ago construction was finally finished on a new suite of offices that were built on the street side of the double-height eight-bay garage, a funny-looking free-form mass of an addition (based loosely after the style of some world-famous architect), which itself has three different kinds of facade claddings and colors and oddly placed windows cut into it like a badly done Halloween pump-kin. I guess it's interesting enough to somebody knowledgeable, for Eunice got a fancy design magazine to come out and take pictures of it outside and in, but to me it looks like the leavings of some giant robot dog, a freakish metallic pile of you-know-what. The new reception area is all Eunice's doing, outfitted with custom-hewn panels of Norwegian birch wood and a long two-inch-thick glass coffee table suspended by tungsten wires coming down from the ceiling, a banquette upholstered in graphite-hued crushed silk running along the walls, which are adorned with contemporary paintings, these changed out monthly to feature another avant-garde local artist (no impressionistic seascapes or boardwalk scenes here). If you didn't know any better you'd think you were in the lounge area of some trendy Asian-fusion restaurant in SoHo, as the receptionist behind the shoji-style console, a hot little multicultural number (like a young Rita but with some West Indian or Thai mixed in) always sporting a walkabout headset, with a tough set to her mouth and given to wearing clingy black T-shirts em-broidered with sequins spelling out things like QUEEN BEE and PRECIOUS, will serve you with unexpected earnestness a freshly made espresso or cappuccino from the push-button automatic Italian coffee machine Eunice insisted upon, or else offer you a selection of juices and mineral waters or even steep you a personal pot of green or herbal tea.
"Hey, Mr. Battle," the girl says a little too brightly, as if it's a shock I'm really here. Her shirt today reads SWEET THANG.
"Your son is out. We don't expect him back until the afternoon."
"I'm just here to use the computer," I say, liking the white-shoe sound of "we" but wondering who exactly that is, or might be.
"Sure thing," she says, and gets up to walk me back to where the "public" computer is. Eunice designed the main office space back here as well, continuing the theme of Chic Eastern Calm, though here there are additional touches of what Eunice informed me during renovations is Comfy Bauhaus, meaning lots of clean surfaces and lines, to inspire efficiency and high creative function. She even instituted a set of office rules about paper and knickknack clutter so that her design scheme wouldn't be sullied. She needn't have worried, though, because there aren't enough employees as yet to fill the space, just Sweet Thang there out front and Jack's assistant, Cheryl, a forty-something looker who normally sits outside Jack's private office but is out sick today, and then the bookkeeper Sal Mondello, who has been with Battle Brothers since pretty much the beginning and refuses to move out of his original office in the old part of the garage. Upstairs in this new wing is a showroom of the work Battle Brothers will soon be doing, mock-up designer kitchens and bathrooms and media rooms with real working appliances and big-screen TVs and furnished (or appointed) as luxuriously as Jack's own house, with antique rugs and heirloom cabinets and framed oil paintings and mirrors. The master plan as indicated by the empty desks is that the administrative and professional design staff will soon expand with the company's gradual shift to work in high-end home renovations, which seems to me to be a bit too gradual, as I haven't yet heard of any confirmed jobs or commissions. Right now Jack and Cheryl and the receptionist and Sal can handle the steady flow of the usual landscaping work and I'm glad to see that Jack hasn't gone ahead and already hired two or three more girls to sit around stripping off their nail polish.
I can't remember her name and so I'm hesitant to start any small talk, though with her clingy top and even dingier matching micro-skirt with no panty lines discernible and heel-to-toe catwalk lope, a springy internal automata makes me want to utter some-thing, some-thang some-thong.